Intellectual capital is largely held in an organization, business and/or university's past and present employees. As employees leave, it becomes more difficult to harness this intellectual capital. To maximize the value of this intellectual capital and the experience of skilled employees and other professionals, knowledge management processes are typically implemented. For example, these processes include conducting interviews or documenting everything the employee deemed to be important shortly before leaving the organization. However, these processes create a variety of problems and do not always succeed in capturing the intellectual capital. For example, what is important to one person is not necessarily important to others. Most knowledge cannot be documented but is inherently connected to people. Questions and documents are inadequate to capture informal conversations or to make social connections visible. Further, given the short time span allotted, it is very likely to miss important pieces of information when interviews are conducted.
Accordingly, relying only on formal approaches like the ones mentioned above will yield poor results when it comes to knowledge retention. An organization, business and/or university needs to take an approach that allows the timely capture/transfer of informal knowledge. Thus, instead of trying to document everything and controlling knowledge transfer, an organization should invest their efforts in facilitating knowledge networking. Allowing employees to connect and interact with each other and other professionals outside the organization, using a technical network of professionals from Government, Industry and Academia—crowd sourcing. By doing so knowledge of subject-matter experts is naturally disseminated across the organization.